Of all the tactical-scale scenarios on Vietnam, the LZ X-Ray battles were always my favorite. One obvious reason is that we have, courtesy of Mel Gibson, a nicely vivid visual representation to connect to. Like Mel, the various scenario builders who have tackled this battle with one engine or another have Hal Moore’s book as a source. There is also the U.S. Army publication Seven Firefights in Vietnam, which was written during the war itself. Enthusiasts have the ability to create very detailed and accurate reconstructions of this battle without an inordinate amount of primary-source research.

For my first step, I returned again to Air Assault Task Force. I had a beast of a time getting it to work for the Battle of Mogadishu. Eventually I got it to do something and I hoped that my experience would improve when it came to other battles in this package.

The game, as distributed, includes a four-scenario version of the Battle at LZ X-Ray, each covering a multi-hour snippet over the several days of fighting. One somewhat-unique feature of this package is that it builds the scenarios over scanned maps of the battlefield so as to provide realistic and accurate terrain. In this case, the game map stretches from the 1st Cavalry staging point at Plei Me, through the fire base at LZ Falcon, onto the area of the battle. Part of the challenge is to manage and coordinate helicopter insertion and resupply across that long stretch of jungle.

First wave of landings inbound, I prep the LZ with artillery fire. In contrast to much of the UI, fire mission plotting works fairly well.

Immediately, I’m frustrated by the UI in this game. The game’s first scenario begins with the 1st Cavalry elements on the ground at Plei Me and the helicopter transport and gunships nearby, ready for action. This means that the first order of business is to get the infantry loaded onto the helicopters.

Good luck with that, eh?

As I described in that last article, the insertion mission just doesn’t seem to work for me at all. Manually loading the troops also wouldn’t work. Finally, in desperation, I switched between the multiple versions of this system that I own (namely the newer, but horrific UI, of Air Assault Task Force and its predecessor, The Star and the Crescent). What I found was that, using Air Assault Task Force, I could successfully order the infantry to load up onto the helicopters. I could then save and load back into The Star in the Crescent to manually order my troops to the landing zone.

Flush with success, I sent my helicopters back to pick up more troops and ordered my initial company into a defensive position. The scale of the game doesn’t encourage micromanagement of tactical position. In fact, my initial positioning attempts, for some reason had them wandering off to the north, into the jungle. Hoping to make use of the game engine as it was intended, I gave them the mission “Support by Fire,” to try to get them into the proper defensive position while they waited for reinforcements to arrive. Big mistake.

My AI subordinates are deranged. Or treasonous.

The system decided that the best way to accomplish such a support mission was to march, on foot, all the way back to Plei Me then turn around, march all the way back to the a position in the jungle near the landing zone and then… well, who knows what would happen then, the scenario would have timed out. I’ll point out that I am explicitly trying to defend the cleared area where I will be unloading my helicopters. Even reproducing this bizarre situation is difficult but what appears to have happened is that, because of the limited capacity of my helicopter transport, I’ve split the command that I gave the order to and so the engine’s first order of business is to reunite the command before moving into position.

Reload, try again. My second insertion is complete, but I don’t think they brought any soldiers with them this time. Too bad, the enemy is here.

After reloading and reissuing all the orders, my initial elements appear to be in a defensive position at the landing zone. While the graphics show them to be standing around in a cluster, their status is actually “defilade.” It also appears that all I’ve got there is a company commander and a weapons platoon. When I tried to bring in another group of troopers, everything seemed to go as before, but it looks like the helicopters arrived empty (screenshot immediately above).

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It baffles me as to how this game has survived to this day is this state. My only guess is that with a saintly amount of perseverance, one can learn to overcome the UI and get the game to do something close to what was intended. Once one puts that amount of effort into it, perhaps there is pleasure to be derived from the game. It is hard to see wasting so much time, though, when moves have me wondering whether helicopters are going to unload units or they have once again shown up empty.

Lt. Col. Moore has set up a headquarters and directs his troopers into position.

Contrast this with a very similar scenario in Steel Panthers. In this scenario also, the clock begins with the 1st Cavalry troopers at Plei Me, ready to be transported, but this time with the first wave embarked. While the map isn’t actually to scale, there is a wide distance between the base and the landing zone, requiring 2 to 3 turns for transport. The victory hexes are awarded largely for gaining control of the landing zone, although there are several more to the west of the LZ. Presumably these additional points represent Lt. Col. Moore’s actual task, which was a search and destroy against suspected enemy positions just beyond his landing site. It wasn’t until after landing that he realized he was fighting a defensive battle against a vastly superior (numerically) force.

As I played this scenario all the way through, my biggest regret came in that opening move. The initial set up not only has the first load of infantry mounted on helicopters but the artillery are loaded-up and waiting at Plei Me also. This is a bit of a departure from reality as one of the LZ Falcon artillery batteries had been in position already for days. The second was to be set-up that morning but planned to land well ahead of the infantry insertion. Not quite realizing what I was dealing with, my artillery was put into place simultaneously with the first infantry landing in LZ X-Ray. I’m quite sure that it didn’t make any difference in the outcome, but I feel cheated not being able to “prep” the landing site with an artillery barrage. That felt import to me.

I also felt the game took a cheap shot at me [SPOILER WARNING – FOR THE REST OF THIS PARAGRAPH]. There are snipers positioned to hit the in-bound choppers. I didn’t loose anybody to them, but a couple of hits meant that my helicopter “retreated” from the map without having unloaded its troops. The position of the snipers is in a place, and I’ll give it away without being explicit, where the lazy player will get shot up. Problem is, I’m pretty lazy. So even having lost a couple of transports, I continued flying into the same (or at least similar) traps because I wanted to save myself some mouse clicks. Point is, I feel a little cheated in that I was being punished for trying to cut down on the clicking. More clicking is not better gameplay.

Overall, this was a positive scenario from the realism perspective. This wasn’t a precise simulation, but it does tackle the portion of this battle that fit within the limits of the Steel Panthers engine, namely that first hour-and-a-half. It may not, however, be the most interesting part of the battle. While landing, the American forces were slowly realizing the quantity of enemy they faced. This scenario has an unknown quantity and position of the enemy facing you and, certainly, if you push out too rapidly from the landing zone you’re going start suffering losses. The length of the scenario doesn’t give you time for the full encounter to develop and, admirably, the scenario developer didn’t try to squeeze the extras in.

For that we go to Squad Battles.

Squad Battles: Tour of Duty has a LZ X-Ray scenario (as well as an LZ Albany one, which I’ll get to later). Its purpose is, apparently, to capture the moment of the battle where the first three cavalry companies have landed and have the player fend of the initial NVA assaults. With this in mind, there are no helicopter insertions over the course of the scenario. Also, and disappointingly for me, there is no off-board fire-support either from LZ Falcon, from close air support, or from helicopter gunships. This means that the player has only the support from the battalion’s mortar company in addition to direct fire. Furthermore, that direct fire is typically only against adjacent units. This is another scenario set in dense foliage where it is rare to be able to spot enemies across more than one hex.

The Lost Platoon is in serious trouble. Can I get them back in time? No.

All of this means we are looking at what I’ve described before as a typical Squad Battles scenario. The choices are few and you’re already in control of the objectives, so there is little in the way of maneuver that makes sense. The biggest choice is the “lost platoon” and the extent to which you try to rescue it. I probably took something close to the historical path in that I made an attempt to get to it and then stopped when I realized that I couldn’t do it. For what its worth (and, hopefully, not ruining the scenario for anyone), failing to rescue the lost platoon, losing it in its entirety plus incurring casualties among the rescuers; this still gave me a decisive victory. Point being, this isn’t a scenario where you have to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something that was deemed impossible in the real fight. Simply not being overrun, apparently, counts as a win.

As far as the Tour of Duty scenarios go, this one is average. Average in both size and scope as well as in game play. While it is pretty hemmed in, it doesn’t have quite the frustration level of the “take these three victory locations in six moves” scenarios. Still, given my expectations for this battle, I’ve come away from this one extra disappointed.

There is another LZ X-Ray scenario, one built by an end-user, that I played many years ago. Sadly, it seems to have been lost in the shuffling of website ownership (it used to be stored at wargamer.com when Wargamer archived scenario files). I must have the file on an old hard disk somewhere around here but, up to this point, it hasn’t seemed worth booting up old systems to try to find it. It’s a shame to see this stuff vanish from the internet so arbitrarily, especially as cloud storage becomes ever more available.

In this one, the focus is more on that “broken arrow” moment of the battle; the point when things were at their worst and the maximal air power and fire support that the Americans could muster was brought down around their defensive perimeter. Titled LZ X-Ray – First Contact, it struck me as a truly “fun” scenario in a ways that the above version was not. I’m not sure if it is really much of a challenge from the U.S. side, but you sure get to control a lot of firepower. As a challenging fight, it may be more interesting from the Commie side, trying to get your soldiers to survive the American rain of fire, but I never tried it that way.

If I ever find that file intact, I’ll let you know.

The situation on November 17th. This doesn’t look like what was in Moore’s book.

By way of contrast, I include for you another screenshot of my Ia Drang ’65 scenario, this time where the clock has advanced to the point where the U.S. has seized initiative and what would be the assault on LZ X-Ray. What we see, instead of a recreation of the historical battle, is a typical TOAW scenario. The forces spread out across the map trying to maintain cohesive lines while simultaneously cutting off and isolating the enemy. Engagements are somewhat limited by the scenario’s withdrawl schedule, but the engine would seem to encourage continuous attack right up until the time limit runs out, so as not to leave any victory points on the table. At least that’s the way I and my computer opponent are playing it.

What should have happened just before X-Ray, I found out by reading Seven Firefights in Vietnam, was that the NVA was regrouping for another shot at Plei Me, likely to take place within a few turns had the U.S. not took the fight to them. Communist forces were largely idle, preparing themselves for their own attack. Likewise, the 1st Calvary units were moving about the map trying to find an elusive enemy, not perpetually engaging them as they retreated or counter-attacked. This lead to a period of relative quiet between the breaking up of the attack on Plei Me and the three days of fighting over the landing zone.

Seven Firefights in Vietnam is, as I said, another reason why this battle gets the simulation love that it has. Reading it, as I did, well after reading We Were Soldiers Once…, it can feel somewhat anticlimactic, but certainly not a complete waste of time. Seven Firefights is but a chapter in a book that’s only 150+ pages total, so you know its going to not have the depth of the later work. It also focus on tactics. It was meant to be a learning tool for the professional soldier about a war that was still ongoing. Moore’s book, by contrast, is in part a tribute to the fallen soldiers of the battle and the war and tends to have a lot more focus on the personal rather than just tactics and command.

OK. So this is … unique.

Seven Firefights is a nice, easily digestible account of the battle that is made all the better by the fact that is available for free as a electronic book. While mostly encompassed by newer accounts, it still gave me some unique insights into the fight.

Speaking of available for free, the website for the book has battle animations that illustrate the fight in a way superior to most other attempts that I’ve seen. Again, very valuable for helping to all that happened over those three days into a proper perspective.

I’ve logged an inexplicably large number of hours playing Arab-Israeli Wars lately. It’s not really a good game, in fact, it is barely even a game. The rules are designed to be played solitaire with a custom deck, but I’ve been playing it on the computer. It tends to start up really fast, so it is something I can run while my system is churning away on other things. Add to that, a game can be finished in, usually, 5 to 10 minutes. That makes it ideal when I want to momentarily distract myself while my computer is preventing me from doing anything important but I don’t want to get up an walk away. The fact that at least half of the games are not challenging, either impossible to win or impossible to lose, doesn’t seem to deter me.

I bring this up now, because I’ve just started playing Vietnam ’65 from Slitherine/Matrix Games. As I’ve been thinking about the design of Vietnam games recently, my first focus was on its design.

Vietnam ’65 is also a “solitaire” game, in that it is meant to be played only as the Counter Insurgent side (the U.S.) against the communists. Normally, we would call this “single player only” or some such, but having in my head this explicitly-solitaire game design, I realize the similarities.

While the manual is non-specific, the tutorial indicates this game represents the Ia Drang valley campaigns of Fall 1965.

Don’t get me wrong. Vietnam ’65 is not a trivial or simple game that I’m trying to compare directly to the first example. There is plenty under the hood to make this game worthwhile and I, for one, find it incredibly addictive. The comparison here is more about game design decisions than the game itself.

Vietnam ’65 is a very-abstracted representation of the Vietnam War some time toward the end of 1965. In fact, pretty much the only way I know the timeframe of the game is that this what it says in the title. When you start the game, you are given a randomly-generate piece of real estate, peppered with villages, roads, rivers and jungles. Obviously, being randomly generated, its not going to correspond to a specific geographic location. Neither does the manual get more specific. The tutorial, however, explains that we are operating in the Ia Drang Valley in the Central Highlands, further fixing time and place to the fall of 1965 and something like Operation Silver Bayonet.

My randomly-generated province. The mini-map shows everything on one screen. It will be hard extending my forces to the eastern edge of this map.

The goal of the game is to achieve the “Hearts and Minds” strategy of the American military. Each of the villages have sympathies that lean toward the Americans, toward the insurgents, or somewhere in between. Throughout the game, the communist units’ activities will attempt to influence village sympathies their way while you must trying to bring them back over to you. Whichever side succeeds in moving the needle wins the game.

Villages are influenced, incrementally, by visiting them. Some villages, when visited by the player, will also give up intel on enemy positions. Greater influence can be had by achieving military victories in the vicinity of a village. Villagers want to be on the side of the winner, so defeating communists near a village will provide a relatively larger boost. In addition to the village scores, the player also manages “political points,” which provides the currency through which he purchases and manages his units. Simplified, when the player operates successfully that allows him to allocate even more resources going forward. But the opposite is true. One can get into a death spiral where failures in the field deprive you of the resources you need to recover.

On this map, the remote villages present a challenge. They are hard to reach and the units sent to the remote corners of the map, once there, become hard to supply.

As simple as it is, the game is (as I said) incredibly addicting. Once I got the hang of it, the 45 turn default game can be run through in one sitting*. Let me get back to what I started off this article with and that is the game’s simplicity and how it applies to the design.

Even after a good many games under my belt, it seems like the win or lose can go either way. In the particular game portrayed in the above and below screenshots, I wound up losing. The winability of any given game is very much dependent on the initial layout of the map plus a dash of luck when encountering your enemies. Good decisions and good outcomes in your combat tend to reinforce success, which you grow to a win. I will add that setbacks don’t have to be fatal, and this is another plus for this game. In some cases, a very bad situation can be reversed and turned into a win.

That initial random setup places the villages, rivers, and jungles and shows it to you on a map before you start. In addition the visible placements there are also”Ho Chi Minh Trail” locations which you can’t see. These hexes are the “spawn points” (to genre-mix my gaming terminology) for the Viet Cong units. Those units are assigned a “mission” which they try to complete, typically moving toward a designated location. A common mission would be to move a unit to a particular (the closest) village, at which point the unit is expended in order to move the influence in the village slightly toward the communists. Another mission involves moving towards an ambush point so as to subsequently attack passing U.S. units.

As the game progresses, the challenge posed by the enemy’s missions grows. The quantity and type of enemy missions conducted against you are determined by the influence score, again reinforcing previous successes or failures. The more successful the enemy was in the past, the more aggressive he’ll become in his future missions.

Executing these missions don’t require any particular smarts on the part of the AI. Having selected the unit and mission, completing them can be very formulaic, as far as the computer’s programing is concerned. There are a couple of missions that involve NVA units seeking out and destroying the player’s assets, but even these don’t involve much in the way of computer player strategy.

In this case, it is the complexity of how a number of simultaneous missions combine to create a hazardous battlefield that creates a tough gaming for the player, not the “AI” of the enemy. In particular, because enemy locations are hidden unless “spotted” by some fairly restrictive sight rules, you are often left feeling around in the dark for the enemy. Because of this, the mindlessness, if you will, of that enemy, isn’t apparent or particularly relevant.

Artillery adds dignity to what otherwise would be a vulgar brawl. The remote firebase lets me extend my reach.

I’m imagining that there is a higher level of gameplay, a strategy of an “expert player” if you will, that works to anticipate the movement of the enemies based on their rules. If I were to try to ferret out the locations of the Ho Chi Minh Trail points and actively interdict them, and then try to intercept NVA movement from their spawn point (the Western edge of the map), I could probably be a much more effective player. As it is, I tend to be stretched thin enough that I’m mostly reacting to the enemy as I find them rather than dealing with them as part of some strategic plan. I’ve handed the initiative over to the enemy and I rely on the fact that that enemy isn’t really capable of much in the way of initiative.

One last point about this game. I’ll not go into too much detail here, although it might perhaps be worth returning to some day. On one hand, this is a very abstract game, difficult to connect in any significant way back to the historical operations that it approximates. At the same time, it captures certain essential features of counter-insurgence warfare and aspects of the asymmetric nature of the fight between the U.S. and the NVA/VC. Bottom line, I think there is more to this game, perhaps, than meets the eye.

With the U.S. 1st Cavalry in support, the ARVN move to reinforce Plei Me.

As a point of comparison, the alternative for operational level Vietnam warfare is The Operational Art of War. At the same time I’m looking at Vietnam ’65, I have my tablet out so I can work through the Silver Bayonet operation as presented in the Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations series of scenarios. This puts the operation in the context of the larger war and gives the perspective as to which units were allocated into and out of the particular theater of operation.

Playing this scenario takes some effort. Each turn requires the review of the notes and careful plotting of the historical movements. Having completed the first volume with a rather unsatisfying draw, I’ve been making an effort to take victory locations beyond what is specified in the narrative, if I can do it without significantly re-purposing units away from their historical assignments. At the same time, though, I am still trying to accomplish every mission that the instructions designate plus satisfy the described historical actions, even when they don’t count for points. The uniqueness of this scenario design makes for a nice compare-and-contrast with another TOAW scenario covering Operation Silver Bayonet.

The ARVN relief column has been ambushed on its way to Plei Me. The fight is on.

One of the original scenarios that came with TOAW was Ia Drang ’65, a treatment of Operation Silver Bayonet at the operational level. As one of the original scenarios, it is limited and focused in its scope. By contrast, so many of the user-made scenarios lean towards the monster end of the scale. Ia Drang ’65 also makes use of a few of the special game features (reinforcement/withdrawal and hidden objectives are two that stand out) without trying to force the game engine outside of that which it is capable.

The map is limited to Pleiku (City), Plei Me, and the Ia Drang Valley westward to the Cambodian border. Units under control are only those that were tasked to the operation in question and the game engine takes care of adding and withdrawing those units as appropriate. Game turns are half-a-week and are played on 2.5 km hexes. In a sharp contrast to my recent immersion in Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations, units are represented per company rather than battalion, making for finer grained command.

I’ll come back to this all to discuss the intense fighting that took place in mid-November during the two battles detailed inWe Were Soldiers. Commenting merely on the province-wide, operational-level representation of Vietnam in 1965, though, we’ve got some different methodologies that produce very different experiences.

Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations, with its focus on reproducing the historical war, still makes for the best historical experience but at the price of the effort the player must put into bookkeeping. It is also somewhere between the strategic and operational levels (albeit with much of the strategy suggested to you via the accompanying narrative). It is a country-wide simulation at a scale where the real drama of a particular operation might come and go in a turn or two and with most of the action taking place off-line (e.g. Silver Bayonet is completed, +5 victory points is not as satisfying as directing the units as they duke it out).

Ia Drang ’65 both gets down to a more interesting level and gives you much more control, but the price here is that you quickly fly off the historical rails. Like I’ve said about other TOAW Cold War treatments, the turn length and TOAW system doesn’t quite match Vietnam’s fighting style. TOAW tends to drive you towards continuous and maximized operations up through the end of the game. While rest and resupply are a factor and must be managed, actually having units sit idle just means you’re leaving victory points on the table. Contrast this with a the way Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations regulates the country-wide allocation of units. At any given time, in most of Vietnam, units are just sittin’ around. You are neither driven to move everything into the “front line” or constantly get yourself prepared for the enemy to pop up out of nowhere. Ia Drang ’65 gameplay doesn’t match the cat-and-mouse nature of most of this campaign. Once the sides are engaged in this fight, it’s pretty much a month-long engagement using traditional hex-and-counter methods until units are eliminated or withdrawn per the rules.

This brings it back to the unique place that Vietnam ’65 fills as an operational simulation. This one really gets you away from that opposing lines of counters situation that most operational boardgames (and their digital equivalents) seem to exhibit. The intention of the game is to integrate a much fuller gamut of actions that might have been taking place in an active province undergoing counter-insurgency operations. In TOAW, unless at least company-level engagements are taking place, actions would be “below the radar” on the map. In Vietnam ’65, on the other hand, we have to send troops out to try to intercept enemies. Even if we’re not actively finding the enemy, we need to just to drop in on the villagers to ask for information about recent enemy movements. This is integrated with a representation (as abstract as that may be) of larger unit engagements with the NVA and the penalties that escalating commitment imposes on your ultimate victory.

I’ll end with a thought experiment for the reader, albeit a reader who has some familiarity with Vietnam ’65. What would an LZ XRay/Albany engagement look like implemented in this engine? Is it even possible? Or is it the best we can do with this game, when we want to approximate an NVA major operation, to toss in a tank and call it good?

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or go on to the next article, taking it back down to the tactical level, albeit for a different battle. You may also jump ahead to the tactical article on the LZ X-Ray fighting.

*There’s a saying that any pizza is a “Individual Pizza” if you’re willing to apply yourself. Likewise, its less that the game length is all that short than that I seem to be unable to get out of my chair until I’ve finished.

Prior to November 14th, 1965, the military of the government of the United States had never fought a battle against the Army of North Vietnam.

The first U.S. combat troops, in the form of 3,500 marines, had landed in Vietnam on March 8th of the same year. Tens of thousands more followed through the summer. In the run-up to the fall of 1965, the war could be described as the South Vietnamese government attempting to subdue a communist uprising within its borders. Despite failures, both political and military, within the South Vietnamese government, the U.S. was confident that the government would ultimately prevail and was providing financial and military aid to assure that outcome. Kennedy had placed as many as 16,000 advisors in Vietnam and Johnson increased this number to 26,000.

For years, however, the government of North Vietnam had been sending aid to the guerillas in the South. This was both in the form of materiel and direct combatants. While the U.S. believed that the South Vietnamese would regain control over their nation, the North had to be dissuaded from participating in that war.

During the 1964 presidential election, Johnson campaigned as the less warlike of the two candidates. Candidate Barry Goldwater was critical (and somewhat prescient) of the policy in Vietnam and where it would lead, but his emphasis on stronger options (tactical nukes, for example) and the Democrats’ portrayal of him as a belligerent warmonger was contrasted with Johnson’s calls for peace. Even in the face of Johnson’s reaction to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, he remained the Peace candidate in the election. Goldwater lost in a landslide.

Johnson’s concerns were about his domestic policy and, for him, Vietnam was a distraction. That distraction could become a disaster, though, and he vowed he would not be the president who “lost Vietnam” in the same way Truman was accused of abandoning China to the communists.

In February of 1965, several Viet Cong attacks had resulted in American casualties and Johnson’s response was to initiate Operation Rolling Thunder. This was a bombing campaign by U.S. aircraft against North Vietnamese targets that would continue for the duration of Johnson’s presidency. At the same time, Johnson urged greater use of ground forces and expressed willingness to increase their deployment. Those 3,500 Marines were landed with the mission of protecting U.S. bases from further Viet Cong attacks.

Fairly quickly, it was clear that the North Vietnamese were not backing down in the face of the American air campaign. The South Vietnamese army had been defeated in the field, in the battles of Bình Giã and Đồng Xoài, and the North was increasing their aid to the communist insurgents. Add to that the increasing political turmoil in the South’s government, and the U.S. seemingly reached a point where they had to fish or cut bait.

In a secret memo from April 6th, Johnson authorized additional troop deployments as well as a change in mission to allow “more active use” of ground troops. By this he meant the authority to use U.S. forces on the offensive.

In August, the Marines launched their first large-scale offensive operation against the Viet Cong, Operation Starlight. This was planned to be a preemptive defensive measure, hitting the Viet Cong at their base to prevent raids on U.S. installations. By the fall, the Army was involved as well. At this point, however, the U.S. was operating against the Viet Cong, a force of irregulars that were no real match for the Americans in either equipment or training.

That changed with the Pleiku Campaign. After the South Vietnamese forces drove off an North Vietnamese Army (NVA) attack on the Pleime camp (with the aid of U.S. Air Power) in late October they requested that U.S. forces, in the form of the 1st Air Cavalry Division, pursue the retreating NVA. November 14th saw the Air Cav. move in and finally meet and then engage the North Vietnamese in two major battles, at Landing Zone X-Ray and a few days later at Landing Zone Albany. When these battles were over, the war in Vietnam had taken on a completely new character.

Washington was now thoroughly awakened to the ferocity of the fighting at X-Ray and Albany and to the large numbers of American dead and wounded beginning to arrive from the battlefields. The war was entering a new and much more deadly phase; President Johnson wanted to know what that meant and what it would cost.

It was a year or two before I started reading Black Hawk Down that I started reading We Were Soldiers Once… under the same circumstances. Another Thanksgiving visit saw me take down my father’s copy of the book and read it between bouts of turkey. When I got back home, I bought my own copy of the book. At the time, however, I was reading some other stuff and decided to hold off with the Vietnam War until I was in the mood for such. As I am now.

I had watched themovie based on the book, so it was not a new story for me. But despite always meaning to, I’d never got around to the source material. I guess I saw the presence of the book on my father’s shelf as enough of an endorsement to push me over the edge.

I Can Hear the Choir

There are a number of ways to write a narrative of a battle. With The Killer Angels, the story is made smooth by filling in circumstance and dialog, as needed, with speculative historical fiction. The “made-up parts” still have their basis in fact, but nobody is expected to believe that the words spoken by Shaara’s Lee, alone in his tent, are 100% accurate. Black Hawk Down was another excellent example, sticking to the facts as they were available, but forming them into an easy-to-read narrative. As I saw when reading that book, part of the advantage the author had in this case is that the battle was very well documented. It allowed a best seller to also become a scholarly source for information on the battle.

Usually, however, one writes potential-best-sellers in a different style than one would a scholarly presentation. With We Were Soldiers Once…, we see that very different style. Rather than saying something like, “Meanwhile, while the men of the 7th Cavalry were moving into position, unbeknownst to them the enemy was…” the author breaks the narrative. Forgoing a smooth transition, we are switched between points of view. General Moore’s voice is interrupted to identify a North Vietnamese commander and quote him directly. If that commander, in his interview, repeated information that was just used a few paragraphs back, well, we read it again. As a primary-source, it is more important that the words of the interviewees get preserved correctly than to be concerned about the readability of the prose or whether the story retains its grip on the reader.

This is not to say that We Were Soldiers Once… is a tough read. It is not. It’s a very readable book and, indeed, a best seller in its own right. However, the style is heavily influenced by the multiple goals of the book. It is meant to be an accurate representation of source interviews and an original source for the battle. The authors also wanted to, perhaps above all, memorialize those killed in the battle. Again doing so interrupts the flow of the narrative. All things considered I agree with them that this is how it should be.

The book’s chapters are divided into three major sections. After some introduction, there is a section about the fight at Landing Zone X-Ray. The next section covers the second major fight, a few days later, at Landing Zone Albany. A final section considers the aftermath of the battles.

The first section, about LZ X-Ray, reads the best. First of all, given the way the battle played out, it is simply a more compelling story. It is no wonder that the movie adaptation limits itself to X-Ray. The battle was well planned and then the uncertainties and FUBARs that arise they were dealt with, ultimately reflecting well on the U.S. forces and its leaders. We are taken through some harrowing moments, but ultimately a combination of excellent leadership and a bit of luck allow the Americans to pull through. With heavy casualties, yes, but giving far more than they got. It also helps that it is Hal Moore’s voice that ties the narrative together. He was there. He was aware of the big picture, as best he could be, and he was successfully orchestrating the battle. When the story jumps to another participant, in another part of the command chain, it is to augment Moore’s own recollection of events.

LZ Albany was very different. Moore still tells the story, but as a non-participant, assembling the story after the fact. The plan, have the forces at X-Ray march out, split, and arrive at two other landing zones, does not seem (particularly in retrospect) to be well thought out. Once engaged, Moore’s counterpart, Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade, was cut off from much of his command and was not cognizant of what was going on in the larger battle. For a time, for the worst part of the fight, nobody was. The story, then, is less of the “battle” than of individual cases of perseverance and heroism. The Americans again survived and again made a decent showing for themselves, but it lacks the direction of X-Ray.

The third section pulls together various aspects outside of the view on the ground on those long November days. Moore discusses political and strategic aspects of the battle. He also focus on the families of the fallen back at home. In one chapter, the narrative is turned over to various survivors, loved ones of those killed in battle. They are allowed to speak of their own experience in their own words. Moore, as narrator, makes no attempt to pull it all together.

All of these pieces may not come together as a unified whole in the way (for example) Black Hawk Down did. But they do all play their part. It is an informative book. It is also a moving book. Near the end Moore comments on a part of our culture that has drifted away. Once upon a time, he remembers, we had schoolchildren memorize the names and dates of the great battles of history. Writing in 1992, he sees that we no longer do that.

[P]erhaps that is the first step on the road to a world where wars are no longer necessary. Perhaps.

In a culture where the wars of our past are no longer accepted as part of our present, books like this one – good books which remember how things really were – become ever more important to connect us with where we have been.

At long last, I can compare the movie to the the source material. As a whole, I still think it was a decent adaptation. Critically, the film was changed from the testimonial style of the book to a story-telling narrative. The film is not meant to be a documentary. It is meant to be entertainment. As a result, there were some obvious deviations from the book. Certain elements were taken from the LZ Albany engagement and dropped into the movie during the LZ-XRay fight. Elsewhere, soldiers’ wives who were actually spread around the country were all, for the purposes of the film, placed at the Fort Bragg army base during the battle. While obviously deviating from “the truth,” I can understand the need to both streamline and “spice up” the story so that the movie flows well.

The change that I have a hard time getting on board with is the way the film ends the battle. In the film, Lt. Col. Moore anticipates an impending NVA attack at dawn and decides to defeat it with a counter charge of his own. He instructs his troopers to “fix bayonets” and leads them (literally leads them, mind you) in a charge that sweeps away the enemy attack and overruns a command post. The scene is not only entirely untrue but entirely implausible.

I understand the screenwriter’s problem here. The tension in the battle was highest on the first night, when the American’s struggled to maintain their lines with shortages in manpower, supplies, and proper defensive preparation. Our protagonists triumph on the second day when they receive ammunition, medical supplies, and reinforcements from other commands. By the time they are ready to be exfiltrated*, the enemy has largely retreated from the battlefield. Moore’s 1st Battalion is replaced on line with the 2nd Battalion. After Moore’s extraction, the 2nd Battalion marches away without any further engagements in preparation for a B-52 strike at the NVA base.

The true ending is triumphant, in its way, but does not follow the arc of film storytelling. We want the fighting to come to a desperate climax near the end of the movie, not somewhere in the first half. Again, I suppose I understand the need to have something like that bayonet charge, and I’m not sure I can come up with something better. Using a B-52 strike as the climax would just be kind of gruesome and, likely, also inaccurate. I don’t think we know whether the bombing was successful. Alternatively, simply showing that the NVA ultimately made it back into Cambodia to fight another day would end on a downer – not good for ticket sales.

One of the scenes that was in neither the book nor the movie (shown above, it is in the deleted scenes section of the DVD) has Moore giving a postmortem commentary on the battle to Robert McNamara and General Westmoreland. It appears to be an informal (perhaps off the record) meeting, maybe on an army base somewhere in Asia. On one hand, cutting this scene from the movie removes what is an excellent wrap-up, putting the battle into the context of the next 10 years in Vietnam. Problem is, again, it is entirely made up. Such a meeting did not take place and probably could not take place. Moore did brief McNamara and “the brass,” but it was in a formal context. The thinking that Moore expresses in the scene is close to what he attributes to McNamara in his book – that what the battle demonstrated was the true cost that victory in Vietnam would demand. It was a price that the U.S., in the end, was unwilling to pay.

Moore’s greatest criticisms, echoed by his fellow battlefield commanders, are for two areas of policy. The first is the unwillingness to pursue the North Vietnamese into Cambodia. It was a fairly open secret that the North Vietnamese were using the Cambodia to transport and shelter troops, yet the U.S. insisted on maintaining the facade of Cambodian neutrality. This meant that retreating NVA units had an invisible line which they could cross into safety and, like Moore’s enemies in this battle, would be allowed to rest and refit until they were ready to fight again. The other policy Moore felt was costly was the policy to limit terms of selective service to 12 months. Shortly after the events depicted in the book, the experienced soldiers who had won the battle rotated home. For the remainder of the war, just at the point where American soldiers had learned to master the terrain and fight against an unconventional enemy, they were withdrawn to be replaced with a new crop of draftees with zero experience.

There is one more area that neither Moore nor any other of the interviewees criticized directly but a pattern comes out of what they did say. Throughout the book, repeatedly, are stories of failures of the M-16. Soldiers describe sifting through several damaged or failed rifles, trying to find one that’s working. Others talk about defending themselves with a 1911 when they found themselves without a working rifle. Some of the problems seem to be functional – jammed actions and the like. Others have to do with plastic parts being destroyed by enemy fire. Just how bad, or not, the M-16 was when initially deployed in Vietnam is the subject of many heated on-line discussions. One wonders if the decision to replace the M-14 was a factor in America’s troubles in Vietnam. And if so, what does that say about the military today, where derivatives of the M-16 remain the main rifle of our armed forces?

*The term “exfiltration,” used to describe a military operation that is the opposite of an “infiltration,” seems to have first been used during the timeframe of the events of this book. Previous uses of the term, going back another hundred years, refer to something being “filtered out.” Modern usage often has it in reference to IT, playing on the military term, likely because it entered the common parlance via computer gaming.